00:00:00.000well here we are again faced with a nation of crime not everything is a crime but there's a
00:00:10.640lot going on as we cover it off every week here on tpl paul micucci joins me to talk crimes of the
00:00:16.160nation thanks man for doing this well the first one as a parent of uh you know several kids this
00:00:23.760osap thing has me just reeling yeah i'm bummed out mike when i when i hear these stories i just
00:00:29.600think to myself my goodness something that's supposed to be so good and such a great program
00:00:34.960gone so wrong the ontario ministry of colleges and universities led by minister nolan quinn is
00:00:40.240investigating potential misuse of osap three academy uh three academy of learning campuses
00:00:48.000opulence education group another one are challenging their removal from osap
00:00:53.040eligibility. So the reason for it is that thousands and thousands of applications and
00:01:01.400payments were made to students through programs at these schools that all came from now what looks
00:01:07.940like the same IP address. In other words, they were just being processed. Right. Yeah. So, you
00:01:12.760know, Mike, right away, you know, allegations haven't been proven in court. So right now it's
00:01:18.260their allegations the academy learning is that denied wrongdoing okay and reported corrective
00:01:23.500steps reporting does not establish personal wrongdoing by either founder so okay so they've
00:01:29.080already responded to this yeah they're saying they haven't done it but there's some really
00:01:32.760you know listen some of the things that popped up in this uh are are there definitely have some
00:01:40.280challenges around them and some red flags that you wonder so the osap amount paid in one year
00:01:47.620doubled and went up from like 500 million to 1 billion that's what i read from a from a
00:01:54.740provincial perspective so you think quite frankly someone somewhere along the way would have said
00:01:59.220okay let's let's do a uh reasonable test on this and see how reasonable this so the number of new
00:02:05.620students uh the average amount of osap because we took a look at before the show mike we were doing
00:02:11.900some math on kind of what osap payments would likely be excuse me and you know it's expensive
00:02:20.700right so tuition is roughly 8 000 uh rent 8 000 groceries another 3 000 um and then you know you'd
00:02:32.620be looking at transportation so you're looking at roughly about 20k that sounds right to send
00:02:40.140a kid to school and osap in my personal experience that sounds just about right and uh
00:02:48.140it depends of course on your qualifications to get that but if for example you have
00:02:55.660a net zero income and you're a student in ontario and your family has disowned you or you're not
00:03:01.260able to rely on your family you get the maximum osap a very quick favor before we continue a
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00:03:34.220you now back to the show so so now the the allegations are what's coming out is quite frank
00:03:40.300there's a bunch of recruiters or a recruiter i don't know how many recruiters and they're basically
00:03:47.180filling out the forms uh enrolling these people and putting them into the course or a course
00:03:55.260whatever course they have whether it's it healthcare finance whatever right yeah well
00:04:00.780Well, if you take a look at the campuses involved, one in Brampton, one in North York, one in Bay Street, you know, total enrollment of students.
00:04:09.160By the way, I never really paid attention to any of these schools, so that they had 6,000 enrolled students was shocking to me.
00:04:17.120But 3,136 of those, or 52% of the applications, were processed for OSAP at just one of the locations.
00:04:25.9203,460 of 6,000 students, 57% at another, and at their Bay Street location, 1,700 of 6,900 or 25% of their students were funded by OSAP in various degrees, but mostly to the max.
00:04:46.320Right. So this is roughly 20,000 a student on average.
00:04:51.720excuse me again and you they basically uh they got the full amount they went to a bank i guess
00:05:01.300they the recruiters helped them fill out the loan apps they got the loans um they disappeared they
00:05:09.360put them into the school i'm trying to figure out how this works now i i think what what happens is
00:05:13.560this just guarantees the enrollment in their school frankly uh all of all of the rest becomes
00:05:19.280the loan ownership of the students that are associated with them.
00:05:37.980Is there any validity to any of these students that were actually going on?
00:05:42.740But there's some other evidence that's a little shocking on that front.
00:05:45.940And that is that some of these agent forces were actually completing programs using AI technology and running the entire curriculum for said students so that they didn't fall behind in their programs.
00:06:02.520Also, when surveyed, many of the students at these schools couldn't tell you, or a shocking number, I guess, couldn't tell you what the program was they were enrolled in.
00:06:12.560Right. Yeah, well, that's where I'm thinking, Mike. I'm just trying to read between the lines
00:06:18.680and figure out how it benefits everyone. Because every scam, every white collar crime or every
00:06:27.280crime like this, quite frankly, has two parts to it, right? One is the person, let's say the
00:06:33.560institution, and the other is, quite frankly, the individual. So, quite frankly, from a college
00:06:40.260perspective or they basically get the fee well it's funny that you say that because if you think
00:06:45.040about it in may of this year the three campuses were among six schools barred from osap citing the
00:06:52.120inability to reliably determine genuine studies
00:06:56.020yeah okay august 2026 the ministry issues its final decision the schools are challenged